Weekly Pulse: The Rocky Road to Reform
by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger

Healthcare is dominating domestic politics this week, as Congress and President Obama outline their visions for reform. The president is pushing Congress to pass a bill that keeps healthcare costs in check before the August deadline. Obama must have been disappointed when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced last week that the Dem's healthcare bills won't cut spending. The president won't sign a bill that doesn't contain cost cuts, so legislators know they'll have to tweak the bill.

Obama's strenuous efforts to pass healthcare reform have invited comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which created the American social safety net. In Salon, Michael Lind argues that Obama's insistence on tying health insurance to employment actually betrays the legacy of the New Deal:

We decided that when it came to benefits our guiding principle should be a "citizen-based social contract." We chose this phrase, not to discriminate against non-citizens, but to express two ideas: first, that benefits like healthcare ought to be not a privilege but rather an entitlement of all citizens in our democratic republic, and second, that all benefits should be detached from employers and follow individuals through their lives. In thinking about healthcare, we rejected various options that would not move us toward a citizen-based social insurance system. Unfortunately, the health plan being promoted by Obama and Congress is based on one of those bad options.

Special interests are sparing no expense in their final campaign to influence healthcare reform. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., was charged with crafting a public plan for a bipartisan seal of approval, but raked in more than $3 million from healthcare lobbyists and industry groups between 2003 and 2008, according to Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent. Baucus announced that he was swearing off healthcare bucks after June 1 in order to avoid the "appearance" of conflict of interest.

Aides for Baucus told The Post that the Finance chairman stopped accepting contributions from healthcare PACs after June 1 to eliminate the appearance of conflicts of interest. But he's not doing a very good job following through. On June 15, according to the Federal Election Commission, Baucus accepted $5,000 from the Schering Plough Corporate Better Government Fund.

Baucus's staff say the Schering Plough money has since been returned. No word on whether the money got sent back before or after the story hit the media.

Advocates of single payer did score a victory last week. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) managed to pass an amendment to the House bill that gives states the option of creating their own single payer healthcare systems. John Nichols of The Nation explains that the Kucinich amendment opened the door to single payer. As Nichols points out, Canada didn't start with a national single payer system. The province of Saskatchewan created its own healthcare program that became the model for Canada's celebrated Medical Services Plan.

Josh Holland of AlterNet says the Kucinich amendment may salvage healthcare reform. That sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it's definitely a step forward. For additional background, check out Truthdig's interview with Kucinich.

Abortion was back in the news this week. The Prospect's Dana Goldstein notes that the White House appears to be vacillating as to whether abortions will be covered by national healthcare. Health and budget guru Peter Orzag danced around the issue on the last Meet the Press. This kind of equivocation is part of a pattern: Back in March, senior Obama domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, a former Planned Parenthood board member, insulted the intelligence of viewers of the Christian Broadcasting Network by claiming that she hadn't even discussed the issue with Obama.

Should the anti-abortionist zealot accused of gunning down Dr. George Tiller be charged as a domestic terrorist? I weigh the pros and cons in my new piece at RH Reality Check.

Finally, Laura Miller of Salon favorably reviews Ryan Grim's new book, This is Your Country on Drugs, an offbeat social history of America's twin love affairs with drugs and moral panics over drugs.

With the August deadline looming, legislators will be scrambling to get their respective bills in shape in time to pass healthcare reform through the budget reconciliation process. Odds are that the bills will be further scaled back and watered down in the process.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.

This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.

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A couple of profiles on the Obama operation.

The first, written by Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein is one of the first to really get at the 'meat & potatoes' of what made it all click for Obama to win the nomination. Basically, Obama has terrific skills himself, but the inheritance of Daschle's DC team (which had already been primed for an '04 race), and the rise of Dean's 50-State Strategy of grassroots and netroots organizing, laid the table for the newcomer to go to the front of the pack. They have excelled at every stage of the campaign, except closing the deal.

The second, on the WaPost, by Jose Antonio Vargas, profiles the Obama web team. It profiles the operation that Joe Rospars has built around YouTube, Social Networking, and Text-Messaging. A nice piece of work in gathering up the most prominent pieces of strategy that the Obama campaign is executing in their online strategy. It doesn't get into their fundraising efforts, their online advertising, or their one-to-one recruitment, but instead focuses on the new media tactics.

Rospars has no peers when it comes to knowing how to write an effective fundraising email. He's done a terrific job at the things set out in the profile and more, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out why he hasn't pursued a blog outreach strategy to date. I'm not talking about a constituency relationship or blogads, but a strategic message one. One that recognizes the blogs as being more powerful in concert with what the campaign is trying to do in opposition to McCain, and coordinating the execution of that strategic message. I'm sure that Josh Orton can speak more to the fault here, so hopefully he'll chime in somewhere with his commentary.

This isn't a ground-breaking idea I'm talking about, but a strategy that's been executed successfully many times over in winning contests over the past few years. Joe was a blogger with Ezra and Nico Pitney at 'Not Genius' back in 2002-03, and then with the Dean campaign, so its not like he doesn't get it. Even John McCain executes on the strategy. Joe ought to do some outreach himself to Peter Daou, who was in a similar situation in '04 with Kerry's campaign. Kerry had won the primary without any help at all from the blogs, and it wasn't until after the swiftboating explosion in August that the Kerry campaign realized they had a problem with controlling the message via the blogosphere. It was probably too late for Peter to do much, but he certainly dived in and worked well with the blogosphere in those last few months to develop an opposition message strategy against Bush.

Now, of course, a number of things have changed, including two big things, which the Obama campaign has recognized. First, blogs have went mainstream, all the traditional media outlets have bloggers and they are 24/7 bloggers with access. They've effectively become the online outreach vehicles for the Obama campaign message push-- the Marc Ambinder, Ben Smith, and Jake Tapper world. Second, there's a world of social networking sites that have huge numbers of available for finding voters and for organizing supporters, and the Obama campaign has leveraged those like none other. But neither have replaced the partisan blogosphere, which has grown about 10X since 2004 in terms of bloggers and readership.

And without the outreach, partisan Democratic bloggers are left on their own to pursue a decentralized strategy which has largely wandered in the desert looking for an attack angle on McCain. Bloggers complain about there not being a consistent message from Obama against McCain because nothing is being coordinated from within the campaign for outreach purposes.

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